My first contact with the KGB effort to use religion to expand the Kremlin’s influence abroad took place in 1959. “Religion is the opiate of the people,[5]” I heard Nikita Khrushchev say, citing Marx’s famous dictum, “so let’s give them opium.” The Soviet leader had come to Bucharest together with his spy chief, General Sakharovsky, my de facto boss at that time, who in 1949 had created the Securitate, Romania’s equivalent of the KGB, and became its first Soviet adviser. Khrushchev wanted to discuss a plan for taking over West Berlin, which had become the escape-hatch through which over three million East Europeans had fled to the West.

At that time I was acting chief of the Romanian Mission in West Germany and chief of Romania’s intelligence station there, and as a “German expert,” I attended most of the discussions. “We'll get Berlin,” Khrushchev assured us. His “secret weapon” was Cuba. “When the Yankees learn we’re in Cuba, they’ll forget West Berlin and we’ll take it over as well. Then we’ll use Cuba as springboard to launch a KGB-devised religion into Latin America,” which Khrushchev portrayed as an already besieged citadel that would soon surrender to the Kremlin. Convoluted? Absolutely, but that was how communist tyrants’ minds worked.